


tender in the darkness only

by with_the_monsters



Series: too many war wounds and not enough wars [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Harry Potter Next Generation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2019-12-16
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:34:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21818995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/with_the_monsters/pseuds/with_the_monsters
Summary: Is it shame, that keeps this secret? An Oscar-winning composer and the young actor everybody wants. It should be romance at its finest. Instead it is only this.
Relationships: Lorcan Scamander/Roxanne Weasley
Series: too many war wounds and not enough wars [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1572211
Kudos: 9





	tender in the darkness only

**Author's Note:**

> My friends and I run a [next gen Tumblr blog](https://nextgensquad.tumblr.com/) and we received an absolutely lovely anon message: really love this blog!! if you guys are taking requests, ellie i would love to hear more about your roxanne and your ideas for her?
> 
> I couldn't resist at all, so here you go!

It should not be happening. Roxanne knows this every second of every minute that she’s with him; her mind seething even as her body sighs and wilts, stretched taut and snapped free by the press of his hands, the surge of his hips.

This time, this after, she doesn’t move. She’s usually the first one up, dress slipped back on, into the kitchen to make herself a strong coffee, not waiting for him to come back to himself and reach for his jeans. He always leaves without saying goodbye. From the kitchen, a mug at her lips, she hears the latch lift and fall, and that’s it until the next time he texts.

But not this time. This time, she stays beside him, still breathing hard, her hands fisted in the duvet and her gaze intent on the ceiling, the dark of it striped by the amber streetlamps outside. He shifts next to her, loose-limbed, blissed out. He shifts again and at last she rolls onto her side and looks him dead in the eye.

Lorcan Scamander. Nine years her junior, still taking bites out of his early twenties while she stares down her looming thirtieth. She saw him at family gatherings as a baby, heard the gossip that he was thinking about acting, had not prepared herself for the camera-ready beauty of him the first time the studio sent her a rough cut of his first film ready for her to score.

His eyes are dark, clouded. His hair is messy, tousled, plastered flat on one side and still desirable in a way fangirls die for. This should not be happening.

He frowns. “What is it?”

“We—” she begins, and then his phone lights up on the bedside table, buzzing angrily against the stained wood. He rolls over, taking the duvet with him, and Roxanne clutches it to herself as he palms the phone up and flops down onto his back, squinting up at the screen. Once his terrible eyes have made out the sender, he scowls and lets it fall. It rattles against Roxanne’s bare wooden floorboards, the noise desperately loud in the silent London flat.

“Girlfriend?” Roxanne guesses, and with a sigh he rolls onto his side to face her.

“She’s not really my girlfriend.”

“Does she know that?”

He reaches out and rests a hand on her elbow. His voice is soft and reassuring when he says, “Of course she does.”

She shudders his hand off and sits up, keeping the duvet tight around her.

“No.”

He surges up to follow her. “No what?”

“Don’t do that. Please, I am literally begging you, do not do that.”

“Do what?”

“Justify this,” she says, and she swings her legs out of bed, toes searching for her slippers. “I mean it, Lorcan. It just sounds so—god, it makes me sound so pathetic when you say shit like that. I’m not here because I want to be your _girlfriend_ , I don’t view her as any kind of competition, I—Jesus. Just don’t do that.”

“Alright,” he replies with easy equanimity. “Then what are you doing here?”

“It’s my flat. You texted me.” She reaches for her dressing gown, can’t get to it without letting the duvet fall, so puts a hand down to find a discarded sweater instead.

“You didn’t have to answer.” He leans sideways and finds his own baggy jumper, tosses it gently so it wraps down over her shoulder. The rolled-up cuffs flop into her lap. She can’t think of anything to say so she concentrates on putting the jumper on instead. She slides her forearms behind her neck, pulls her hair out from under the collar.

She’s about to stand up and go for her coffee when he reaches out and, so carefully, takes her elbow.

“Rox, please. Don’t do that again.”

“Why not?” She turns to face him at last, gazing down at him, tall and splendid there against her cheap sheets, that money-making face staring right back at her frankly. He lies for a living, she reminds herself firmly, that face can do anything he wants it to do and people buy it hook, line and sinker. She will not fall for it.

He looks down and lets her go. His shoulders lift and fall as he takes a breath, brow furrowed, like he’s working through lines in his head.

“Why did you say yes, the first time I asked if I could come over?” 

She shuts her eyes. “I honestly don’t know.”

“Well, you did say yes. And then you said yes the next time, and the next time, and—”

“Alright. I get it. I make bad decisions.”

“You don’t, though.” He shifts upwards on the bed, bare shoulders pressed back against the headboard, his expression somehow tired and intent and sad all at the same time. “You don’t make bad decisions, Rox. I know your cousins, remember, I know what bad decisions look like. I make a fair few of my own. But you – everything you do is purposeful. The way you score, that’s how you live, studying everything and making sure each reaction fits, each rise and fall of melody. That’s why studios kill to get you.”

“Not the way they kill to get you,” she says, and he huffs out a bitter laugh.

“I never wanted to be wanted this way.”

“We don’t get to pick much about what happens to us.”

“You do.”

“I didn’t pick this.”

“You did, though.”

“No, I didn’t. If I could have picked I never would have picked this. Sneaking around with a guy almost a decade younger than me? Fucking behind his girlfriend’s back—”

“She’s not my real girlfriend,” he interrupts, but Roxanne carries on like he hasn’t said anything.

“—never even speaking in public, because we’d have no excuse to if it weren’t for this, and you don’t dare do anything that might turn the studios off you.”

“It’s my life, Rox. This job, it’s all I have.”

She sighs and gets up at last, the jumper skimming her thighs.

“I know. That’s why we keep doing this. In the dark, out of the way, in my shitty flat so nobody’s hanging around to see you leave.” She raises a hand to forestall him as he surges forwards. “I’m not asking you for more, Jesus. I have some self-respect. I’m just saying, you need to decide, either this is something or it isn’t. If it isn’t, fine. I have other options. But if it something, if you want it to be something, then you need to make that choice before you text next time. I’m sick of feeling like I’m doing something wrong every time I look at you.”

“Please.” His voice is very faint in the amber dark. “Please don’t make me do this.”

“I’m sorry. I have to.”

“I just—” he’s getting up too, suddenly, rising out of bed, naked and fit and spreading his arms like he’s helpless, wounded, about to be bound to a cross, “this is the single thing I have in my life that belongs to me. Do you get that? Everything I do, every tiny choice I make or book I like or girl I talk to, the minute it happens it belongs to the world. It’s splashed across every gossip rag, every blog, every Instagram fan page. It’s not like it is for your cousins, for the Potters. They can outrage everybody as much as they like and not suffer, because they were born to this, like royalty or something. But me, I had to earn this. I had to fight tooth and nail for every scrap of attention I get now and the slightest slip will end me overnight. So I give the world everything, I have to… but I don’t want to give them this.”

Roxanne steps back. “Are you that ashamed of me?”

His fists curl. “Ashamed? Are you that blind?”

“Lorcan—”

His voice is low, hoarse. “It’s the exact opposite of shame, Roxanne. The exact opposite.”

And then he’s bending down, scrabbling for his jeans, pushing his feet into them while his chest heaves, emotion pounding through him. Roxanne half reaches out for him before she can help herself. She hadn’t expected to lose control of this conversation so quickly.

“Lorcan, wait, please. I’m sorry. I didn’t—”

“It’s fine.” He pulls his t-shirt down over his head. He’s still scowling when his face appears above the collar. “I should have realised that’s what you thought of me. Of this. I didn’t—look, I don’t text you secretly because I want to hide this, not in that way. It’s secret because of the way I’ve felt about you since you came to show off that first score, do you remember?”

She does. She remembers it in exquisite detail. Months mired in the curve of Lorcan’s smile, the straight line of his jaw, the way his muscles shifted in the soft white shirts on-screen. The sight of him in real life, this grown man she last saw aged fourteen, covered in mud and grass and howling. She had readied herself for it since the first time she watched the rough cut all the way through, had told herself she was fine even as she added flourish after flourish to his theme, developed his musical motif well beyond what she had ever done for another character.

Unbidden, her eyes go to the Academy Award tucked on her dusty shelves, half-hidden behind a Christmas card she never got around to throwing away. He did that for her. He did that, and she will never tell him.

“They’d said it was you doing it,” he’s saying, buckling his belt, “Roxanne Weasley scoring, and everyone was so excited, because they knew you were the best even then. And I thought, fine, okay, it’ll be good to see her again. It’s been seven years, a good chance to catch up, maybe we should get a drink and talk family gossip after everything’s over with. And then you walked in, and you were wearing that white ribbon in your hair, clutching the music to you like someone was going to try to rip it off you. You looked like you had no idea what you were doing there, sort of bemused, like there was no way you deserved a room full of people salivating at the chance to hear your music. And then you saw me, and the way you smiled—that was it, Rox. That was when I knew I couldn’t give this to the world.”

She can’t speak. Can’t think. Can only hold her hands against her stomach, staring at him, terrified of what is going to come out of his mouth next.

“I’ll tell my PR team tomorrow that everything’s over with Rachel. Even if it’s only pretending, I don’t—I won’t do it anymore. But I won’t text you. I won’t text you because I made my choice the day you showed your score off. And I don’t think anybody except you deserves to know that yet.”

“Lorcan—” she chokes out, but he’s already shouldering his way out of the door, pushing through into the cluttered hallway and out onto the landing.

“Lorcan,” she tries again, following him out with legs turned to ice. But he’s already gone, his dark head disappearing down the stairs, shoulders hunched beneath the t-shirt.

She almost chases him down and screams after him in the street. But she doesn’t. Instead she goes back into her flat and she locks the door and winds her arms around herself, clutching her jumper tight.

He didn’t have to say it aloud for her to know the other things he meant. That he is not ready to tell the world, but perhaps she isn’t either. That when she put that deadline before him, she wanted him to pick never texting her again. He knew it, and she knew it, and cowardice kept the words in her throat. She has never been able to make the difficult decisions for herself.

She has worked so hard to get to where she is. She has clawed her way up as much as he has, fought indifference and apathy, scored a hundred films that never saw the light of day and worked so hard every minute to prove herself as somebody worthy of hiring, worthy of rewarding. To get embroiled in something like this now could be the end of her. They’ll say she was sleeping with him back then, before _Andante_ , that he was the only reason she made it big. They’ll tear into her for dating a guy so much younger than her, so young and so naïve, somehow, though in their eyes he’ll simultaneously be worldly and wonderful, able to get lucky even with a girl so much older than him. It’ll be a mess, and he’ll weather it, but she will not. His is the famous face, after all. She’s just the ghost who makes the music happen.

That’s all without even imagining what her family will say. Fred will be kind, because Fred is Fred, but her cousins are another matter entirely. Lily might be steadier these days but she’s still the same Lily. Roxanne spent seven years sharing classrooms with her, doing everything she could to stay unnoticed, never more glad than when she could flee to the Hufflepuff common room and escape the terrible mania of Lily in one of her strange wild moods. Lily will have a field day with this. She won’t be able to help herself.

Her phone pings from the pocket of her coat, abandoned an hour earlier on the sitting room floor. She bends to pull it out and squints at the screen. Swallowing hard, she unlocks it.

_Lorcan: Ive already decided. Its your turn now._

Anguished, she curls her hand around the phone, heart frantic beneath her ribs. Her turn to decide.

Courage floods her, strong and true. Her fingers hover over the keys, and then at last she starts to type.


End file.
